[After Irish culture is brought up in comparison]So you believe the Rome's propoganda about Vikings, Germans and 'Barbarians'?... The nations of that region [modern-day Russia] asked the Vikings to come rule their land, and teach them the ways of peace. The viking kingdoms were orderly, peaceful lands of serene wisdom and love.

What book are you reading? World History for Conservatives (only 200 pages, starting at the time of the agricultural revolution because it was only 6000 years ago and that's how old the earth is, until now).

As a hardcore Viking enthusiast...no, not really. True, the Vikings don't deserve ALL the negativity they get, but you can't deny that they did their share of sacking and pillaging and all that rot, even if they were accomplished explorers and traders as well. The dead at Lindisfarne monastery would agree with me here. Also, the song \"London Bridge is Falling Down\" refers to a Viking attack on London. Not to mention there were multiple attacks on Paris. So, sorry mate, but there was plenty of Viking-related violence.

During the Viking age, while Scandinavia did have laws like any society, it was pretty ruthless and warlike. Very \"eye for an eye\", so to speak. You were banished for manslaughter, for example, which is pretty harsh by today's standards. If you read the Havamal, a book of wise Norse sayings, you'll see that their society was very pragmatic and anything but full of \"serene wisdom and love\".

And no, the Vikings weren't asked to rule the Russians, they just intermarried with them. So close, yet so far.

Actually a few villages would have pushed them back, a couple longships full of sea-wary men would be no contest for war-ready natives. The pillaging was no picnic for the vikings, it was as unpredictable as any battlefront (except when they hit remote monastaries, who shouldn't have been hoarding the gold anyway)

It wasn't the Vikings, a nation, it was ravagers, outlaws, sometimes not welcome back home.

Where I come from, the surviving villages with Scandanavian names tend to be built on areas of lower quality soil than the villages of earlier origin.

This suggests that the Danes (call them vikings if you want to) were given unused land to settle, rather than taking over existing settlements and renaming them in their own favour (a common enough practice during a conquest). All this means, though, is that the situation wasn't as simple as just reaving or just trading. In other words, very human.

the irish we the only people to successfully defeat the vikings in battle and they did it with inferior weapons

Ireland was also home to some strange and mysterous events WRT invaders from Scandinavia. A few ships would come in, smash and burn a bit, then set up a colony. When the next group came by a few years later, the colony would have disappeared completely. So they'd try again. Rinse and repeat a few times, and there were still very few long-term settlements but a surprising and inexplicable increase in the number of red-headed Irish people. It was, of course, a complete coincidence that the Irish climate is rather more temperate than what the raiders were used to.